“There was more to it than that.” Delgado hesitated. “Franklin’s father was cleaning out the attic one day when he discovered a collection of specimen jars containing pieces of dead animals. Dogs, cats, squirrels, other things. Franklin had no job, but it seemed he did have a hobby. A hobby he’d pursued in secret since he was nine years old.
“A few weeks after his parents cut him loose, their house mysteriously caught fire. Fortunately the flames were put out before any great harm was done. Arson was suspected, and everyone knew who was responsible, but there was no proof. Anyway, Franklin’s parents couldn’t stomach the thought of taking their own son to court. But for months afterward, they lived in fear of further retaliation. They were lucky; Franklin didn’t bother them again. In fact, they heard nothing more about him until the news of his arrest in Los Angeles.
“The rest of the story is less clear, but the Idaho authorities have found a few people who remember a young man named Franklin Rood.
“Deprived of his parents’ financial support. Rood took a variety of odd jobs, drifting from town to town, traversing the state of Idaho several times. Exactly what he was up to during that period may never be known. There are several murders or mysterious disappearances he may very well have had something to do with. He pasted clippings about them in his scrapbook, but he’s admitted to nothing. I’ve attempted to interview him twice, and three other detectives have tried as well. He just sits and stares.”
Wendy remembered those dull flat eyes, shark’s eyes. She shivered. To dispel the image, she asked, “When did he move to L.A.?”
“A little more than two years ago, when he turned thirty.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps for the same reason so many people go to Hollywood: to become a star. L.A. is a media town, where any killer with a gimmick and a catchy name is guaranteed nationwide coverage. Clearly Rood craved publicity. He loved the news reports, the headlines, the panic his murder spree inspired. And L.A. is a big city, easy to get lost in. He may have felt he had less chance of being caught there than in a small town.
“Before he left Idaho, he appears to have come into some money—enough to permit the purchase of that storage trailer and the parcel of desert land. Our best guess as to the source of his sudden windfall is a rash of burglaries in the Pocatello area that occurred around that time. Rood, you remember, had experience in breaking and entering from his teenage years.
“With money in his pocket, he bought the Ford Falcon, drove to Los Angeles, and took an apartment on the Westside. He got a job at Crane’s with the help of some false references that were never checked. Not long afterward he started making his clay sculptures. Then he became the Gryphon.”
“In a strange way,” Wendy said softly, “I can almost sympathize with him. I didn’t have the greatest childhood either. And for a long time I thought I could never change, never grow, and I hated myself for that. I guess I hated the world too. Of course,” she added, “I didn’t take out my problems on other people.”
Delgado nodded. “That’s the difference. Nobody’s blaming Rood for whatever private pain he suffered, only for the pain he caused. But we must blame him for that. We must not shrink from passing moral judgments. Not in a case like this. If we do, we only encourage more mayhem, more rampant violence, more Franklin Roods.”
“And there will be more like him,” Wendy whispered. “Many more. Won’t there?”
Delgado sighed. “Yes. I’m afraid there will.”
The two of them lingered in the restaurant over coffee and dessert. When they left at five-fifteen, the sun was sinking low in the sky. They strolled along West Beach to the yacht harbor and stood looking at the rows of pleasure craft tinted orange in the surreal light of late afternoon. The wind teased Wendy’s hair and cast it streaming behind her, long and loose and unclipped, the way she always wore it now.
They said nothing for a long time. At last Wendy broke the silence.
“With the hearing tomorrow and so much else to do, I’m surprised you can take the time to”—to be with me, she was thinking—“to get away like this.”
Delgado smiled, as if he’d heard the words she hadn’t spoken.
“A couple of years ago,” he said in a faraway voice, “there was a woman in my life. Her name was Karen. She loved me, but I never made time for her. My work always came first. And so I lost her.” He looked at Wendy and smiled. “I’ve decided not to make the same mistake twice.”
She felt the heat of blood in her cheeks and knew she was blushing. She wanted to turn her head, avoid his eyes, but she couldn’t. His gaze held her.
Slowly, tentatively, he reached out and drew her close. An image flashed in her mind—Rood’s face—and she almost pulled away, but then Delgado’s lips were pressed lightly against hers, and the memory of Rood receded like a bad dream.
She let him kiss her. She felt no fear. She felt nothing but a sudden buoyant lightness, the wordless sense that she could float free of the earth like a helium balloon and fly and fly and fly.
And then she knew that she was healing, and that everything really would be all right.
38
Rood had no wristwatch—it had been taken from him along with all other personal items except his glasses—so he had no idea what time it was when the door of his cell opened on Monday morning. Two guards entered. At their command, he faced the rear wall and put his hands behind his back. He felt a pair of handcuffs snap into place. Click. Click.
When he turned to face the guards, one of them noticed that his glasses were now secured by only a single stem. The right temple, the one with the broken hinge, was missing.
“Hey, what happened to you, four-eyes?” a guard asked.
Rood just stared at him.
“Fuck that,” the other guard said. “Let’s get moving.”
They hustled him out of the cell, then along the corridor to the elevator. Rood’s heart was beating hard, but not with fear—never with fear. With energy. With power.
On the ground floor the guards transferred him to the custody of three deputies, stern square-shouldered men who wore gun belts and riot batons. They led him to a Department of Corrections cruiser parked in the underground garage.
The Los Angeles County Jail was located at 441 Bauchet Street in downtown L.A. The Criminal Courts Building, where the hearing was to be held, was several blocks away, on Temple Street, between Spring Street and Broadway. The drive would take at least five minutes.
Five seconds was all he would need.
He climbed into the rear of the cruiser. One of the deputies slid in beside him. The other two sat up front. A wire-mesh prisoner screen divided the front and back seats.
The car left the garage through a gated exit. As it crawled along Bauchet to Vignes Street, Rood twisted slightly in his seat so that his manacled hands were no longer within view of the deputy beside him.
With his right hand, he reached underneath his left sleeve.
His plan had formed whole in his mind yesterday afternoon, in the moment when he held his glasses up to the light and saw the vein of flattened steel running through the plastic temple. The plastic had been molded around a thin blade of metal for added sturdiness. It was this metal stem, in fact, to which the broken hinge was soldered.
Last night, once the lights were out and the other convicts were snoring and muttering under their blankets, he cracked open the plastic temple in his powerful hands, then extricated the steel blade. He scraped off clinging crumbs of plastic with the heel of one of his black prison-issue shoes, then carefully wedged the tip of the metal stem under the heel and pulled up on the longer end until it was bent at a ninety-degree angle.
For the rest of the night, he turned the metal tool over and over in his hands, admiring it in the dark. He was sure it would work. From his readings on the art of locksmithing, he knew that a handcuff lock was remarkably easy to pick. A common locksmith’s tool called a button hook would do the job. And a button hook—crude but, he believed, entirely adequate for his needs—was what he’d just made.
As the cruiser continued west on Vignes, Rood’s questing fingers found the strip of adhesive tape, formerly used to mend his glasses, which now affixed the button hook to his left forearm. He peeled off the tape and removed the tool.
Carefully, doing his best to betray no hint of the subtle manipulations behind his back, he inserted the short end of the steel stem into the keyhole of the left handcuff, then turned it.
Click.
The cuff was opened.
He was free.
The cruiser cut south onto a narrow side street empty of traffic and people. A stop sign was just ahead. Rood felt the car decelerate as the driver eased his foot down on the brake.
Now.
He whipped his hands out from behind his back. The handcuff on his right wrist was still locked, the chain and the left cuff swinging with it. The deputy beside him barely had time to pivot in his seat before Rood smashed the empty handcuff into his face. The man’s nose burst like a snail. Rood grabbed at the gun in his holster, but the deputy jerked away, shouting to his partners, his own hand on the gun butt. The two men up front were turning, drawing their revolvers.
Rood wrapped his arms around the deputy and twisted the man roughly in front of his own body to shield himself. For a second time he swatted the cop hard in the face with the steel manacle. The deputy groaned and released his grip on the gun. Rood jerked it free.
The driver squeezed off a round, firing through the prisoner screen. The bullet impacted on the back of the seat inches from Rood’s head. Rood lurched sideways, cocked the deputy’s revolver, and jammed the muzzle up against the wire screen. He fired four times. The windshield was sprayed with red.
The deputy sharing the backseat with him moaned softly as Rood put the gun to his head and squeezed the trigger.
Then it was done. All three of them were dead.
Panting hard. Rood grabbed for a door handle, found none. The rear doors of the car could be opened only from the outside. He smashed the side window with the butt of the revolver, then reached through and fumbled the door open.
Swiftly he climbed out of the cruiser. The street was still empty. Someone might be watching from a window, but even so, it would take the cops awhile to piece together what had happened. Quite possibly nobody in the neighborhood had heard anything more than the repeated backfiring of a balky car; the cruiser’s rolled-up windows would have muffled the gunshots.
Rood slipped behind the wheel, shoving the driver onto the lap of the dead man in the passenger seat. He laid his foot on the gas pedal, and the cruiser rocketed forward.
He heard himself laughing as he wiped blood off the windshield with the sleeve of his shirt.
It occurred to him that he could do whatever he liked now. He could switch cars and drive to the Mexican border. Once on the other side, he could create a new identity for himself and start a new life. In time he could resume killing. There were many attractive young women in Mexico.
On the other hand, if he went through with the plan he had in mind, there would be no possibility of escape. He was certain to die.
But the bitch would die first.
Which mattered more to him? Ending her life—or preserving his own?
He considered the question carefully, and then, with full understanding of the consequences, he made his choice.
Parking at a curb, Rood unlocked the other handcuff, then ran to a pay phone, feeling terribly conspicuous in his blue overalls and prison grays. He leafed hurriedly through the directory hanging by the wire cord from the sheet-metal shelf. It took him less than thirty seconds to find the listing in the White Pages.
He smiled as he remembered driving the bitch down Santa Monica Boulevard in the stolen Dodge he’d passed off as an unmarked police car. As the towers of Century City glided by, she remarked, “I work there.” He asked what sort of work she did. “I write informational booklets for an actuarial firm,” she answered, then added helpfully, “Iver and Barnes.”
He studied the company’s address and memorized it.
A block away he pulled into an alley. He dumped the deputies’ bodies on the pavement, then opened the trunk of the car. Inside, among the blankets and spare coats, he found a shotgun.
He hefted the gun. It was a Remington 870, a 12-gauge pump-action job fitted with a shoulder sling and pistol grip instead of a full buttstock. The magazine held five shells. Rood searched the interior of the trunk till he found two boxes of additional shells, twenty-five in each. The shells, he was pleased to see, were three-inch Magnums loaded with 00 buckshot. Powerful artillery, perfect for hunting deer or other large game.
He shrugged on a long raincoat from the trunk, stuffed the boxes of ammo in the deep pockets, and carried the shotgun with him as he slid back into the driver’s seat. He sped off, heading toward Century City and the offices of Iver & Barnes.
Along the way he stopped at an art store in Hollywood. He pumped the Remington’s action and released a spray of buckshot, laughing as the clerk and his customers dived to the floor. They gave him no trouble as he searched the shop and took a box of modeling clay.